A month before the Climate Summit in Paris considers how to reduce our collective carbon footprint and to prevent further degradation of the planet, a huge swath of Indonesia is ablaze. The forest fires which have raged since August, have produced 61 megatons of carbon each day — more than China, and the US, for several weeks —and have dumped more pollution into the atmosphere in three weeks than all of Germany produces in a year. The resulting smog has made the news, and raised tensions among Indonesia’s neighbours, but outside the region the media have paid little attention to how the fires illustrate the futility of tackling climate change issues when stricter environmental safeguards can be easily ignored or circumvented.
In 1997 Indonesia endured a series of forest fires so fierce and large that, taken together, they may well have been the largest conflagration in recorded history. Burning for several months, the fires razed 25 million acres of land and dumped up to 2.5 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. The damage cost more than US$4 billion in economic losses. Three years later the census also indicated that pollution associated with the fires had led to the disappearance of up to 15, 000 children due to a sudden spike in foetal, infant and child mortality.
Nevertheless, despite these losses, slash-and-burn deforestation continued at its usual pace. Between 2000 and 2012 a further 15 million acres of land was deforested. Indonesia did little to help small-scale farmers move beyond clear-cutting, nor did it reform the unsustainable production of palm oil. Both practices contributed to the current devastation which has already consumed 4 million acres of land. This year’s fire has choked large parts of the country in thick smoke – threatening the long-term health of tens of thousands of young children and it has even forced members of parliament to wear face masks during debates.
Indonesia’s smog gives a foretaste of what may lie in store for even larger countries. More than half of India’s agriculture depends on monsoon rains that will likely become “highly unpredictable” if the global temperature continues to rise, threatening to make a troubling situation far worse. India already has the least breathable air on the planet and, although a third of its population lives without electricity, it produces more pollution than any other country except for China and the US. The Indian government has pledged vast sums of money into sustainable energy, including a solar electricity projects that will produce 100 gigawatts of power, more than 25 times the current amount. These promises are a good start, but they will mean nothing unless further environmental degradation can be stopped.
Hilal Elver, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, recently warned that climate change not only threatens to exacerbate current threats to world food security, but to place a further 600 million people at risk of malnutrition during the next 60 years. Predictably, the worst affected areas will likely be those who have done least to create the crisis. Elver emphasized that whatever “mitigation and adaptation policies” are adopted “should respect the right to food as well as other fundamental human rights.”
Elver’s words touch on a truth that is often forgotten in climate change discussions: that the disregard of environmental rights is often closely linked to other abuses. Following the long terror of Suharto’s dictatorship, the absence of accountability allowed many of his most abusive supporters to slip quietly into other forms of exploitation within the Indonesian economy, one part of which were the country’s massive illegal logging operations. As George Monbiot observes in the Guardian, “Those who commit crimes against humanity don’t hesitate to commit crimes against nature.”
There is a good reason that Indonesia has done so little to reform its unsustainable practices in the last 20 years. It hasn’t been forced to do so. Carbon trading and other sophisticated climate change mechanisms may prove decisive as mid-term solutions to the current crisis, but immediate action is also essential. Unless the government of Joko Widodo, and large multinationals like Kraft Heinz, Pepsico and Starbucks face international consumer pressure to end their cynical neglect of a vital carbon sink, and to reform their supply chains for products that contribute to widespread deforestation — there is little reason to expect that Indonesia’s forests, and the vast quantity of plant and animal life — including several endangered species — that is disappearing in the current fires will be any better off ten years from now.
